INCIDENT REPLAY · 2018-07-09 (culmination of years of activity)
Bitcanal 'hijack factory' disconnected
A Portuguese hosting firm announced unrouted or abandoned address space, at least 130 documented cases, and leased it to spammers. After a public NANOG thread and Oracle Dyn evidence, transit providers and exchanges disconnected it one by one; the last transit dropped on 2018-07-10.
A reconstruction, not the operator's network. Hammerhead's authors rebuilt the change from the public record as a small network of their own. No configuration here is the operator's. What follows is what the tool reported on that reconstruction; it is not a claim that the tool would have prevented the outage.
What happened
Who: Bitcanal (AS197426, also AS3266) caused; served by Cogent, GTT, Level3, BICS, Hurricane Electric, IP Telecom and IXPs until cut off
The summary at the top is paraphrased from the sources below. Hammerhead's catalog rates its confidence in this account high.
Sources
- https://blog.apnic.net/2018/07/12/shutting-down-the-bgp-hijack-factory/
- https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2018-June/096034.html
- https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/07/notorious-hijack-factory-shunned-from-web/
- https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/internet-transit-providers-disconnect-infamous-bgp-hijack-factory/
What the public record says
- A Portuguese hosting firm announced unrouted or abandoned address space, at least 130 documented cases, and leased it to spammers. After a public NANOG thread and Oracle Dyn evidence, transit providers and exchanges disconnected it one by one; the last transit dropped on 2018-07-10.
- Who: Bitcanal (AS197426, also AS3266) caused; served by Cogent, GTT, Level3, BICS, Hurricane Electric, IP Telecom and IXPs until cut off
What the reconstruction assumed
Decided by Hammerhead's authors to build a network that runs. None of it describes the operator's network.
Everything below is ours.
- The family template (
tools/replays/gen_family_audit.py): PROVIDER-1 (AS 64500, one of the providers that carried Bitcanal) has a session to BITCANAL-1 (AS 197426, Bitcanal) with no inbound prefix filter, a prefix limit, no AS-path filter, and a second session with every safeguard, so that each finding is one row. - Every provider that carried it had a customer session accepting prefixes with no registry backing; modelled as a customer session with no inbound prefix filter at all, which is the filter-generation hygiene the record points at.
- No change is replayed: the announcing network's change is not ours to gate. The audit runs on the accepting router's healthy configuration.
- Cisco IOS syntax and stand-in address space throughout. A reconstruction, not any operator's configuration.
What Hammerhead said
Each run below is pinned by Hammerhead's replay tests at commit 0ee9732: the verdict and the quoted text are checked against the tool's output, and a run that disagrees fails the test. Reason lines are copied verbatim; a pinned line can be part of a longer reason. Every preflight run uses --max-blast-radius 100, so a change is never counted as caught merely because it touched many devices of a small network.
PROVIDER-1's own router, no change: no inbound filter
now: fail (finding)An audit of one snapshot, no change: hammerhead nqe-library --mode run, check nqe.bgp.route_map_in_attached. Pinned status: fail, a finding whose evidence contains the text below.
Evidence pinned (the evidence contains each line)
- 1 row(s)
- PROVIDER-1
- 197426
First run, before the fixes this batch prompted
first: fail (finding)1 row(s) returned (expected 0); first: s.device=PROVIDER-1 s.peer=172.16.0.2 s.remote_as=197426
Pinned in tests/gauntlet/replays-audit.yaml.
What changed in Hammerhead because of it
From the “What was fixed” table in Hammerhead's replay notes, where each fix landed after a failing test. “Found by” is copied as written; a family name means the batch this incident belongs to.
Inbound max prefix length and AS-path filter on BgpSession
prefix_list_max_length and a new ebgp_inbound_as_path_filter audit stop being stubs: a /32 for somebody else's address wins by longest match wherever it is accepted; a prefix filter generated from a forged registry object says nothing about whose path.
Found by: Accepting-network family
Limits
- The configurations are a reconstruction. Where the record is silent, the assumptions above fill the gap; if one is wrong, the replay is wrong in that respect.
- A verdict describes the reconstructed network's converged state. Timing, traffic load, and anything a device does that no configuration states, such as software reacting to a health check or a firmware bug, are outside it.
- A pass is reported as a pass. A fail says a gate fired on the reconstruction, nothing more.
- Why the catalog counts this outage as partly in scope: Every provider that carried it had a customer session accepting prefixes with no registry backing; filter-generation hygiene is auditable, the customer's intent is not.
Imported from docs/replays/bitcanal-2018/FACTS.md and the replay manifests in the Hammerhead repository at commit 0ee9732.